The book has a global sweep, and the cross-referencing between chapters -combined with the diversity of the contributions -gives the book a sense of unity that is rare for large companions and handbooks to achieve.Part Two: Global Perspectives is an engaging intercontinental canter that includes two pieces on censorship in China, the complicated impact of France's commitment to secularism (laïcité) on free speech debates, and an investigation into the influence of conservative sensibilities on freedom of expression in Japan by Ryusaku Yamada.Noah Mellor's chapter on the Arab region challenges the notion that ideals of media freedom from the Global North can be transplanted into other areas, contending that local cultural factors can make for distinctive conceptions of freedom of expression.Controversy is not hard to find in connection with contemporary debates around freedom of expression, and Part Three delivers a thorough exploration of these issues. Socalled cancel culture, the "war on woke", Holocaust denial, the regulation of pornography, academic freedom and the impunity enjoyed in many countries by the perpetrators of crimes against journalists are all analysed in a succession of well-paced chapters.The book's tone, including the editors' introduction, is generally anchored politically to the Left, and while broad in its scope, the companion might have benefitted from a contribution or two from the other side of the political spectrum. The Right does not have a monopoly on the abuses and charades of free speech, and it is not always clear whether the nomenclature used to characterise some current free speech proponents on the Rightsuch as free speech "fundamentalists" or "grifters" pursuing their "war" on woke -is helpful in terms of stimulating the kind of measured debate that the culture wars urgently require from both sides as an antidote to the welter of ad hominem and polarising rhetoric that swirls online.But as both a distillation of key issues and a stimulant to further debate, this is a timely book. Steel and Petley have assembled a superb collection that casts fresh light on this cornerstone issue. In that sense it is a deeply civilised and civilising piece of scholarship.